Topic: Cybernetics and conciousness

[The GrimSqueaker]

This came up in the new A Sanctuary of Worms short story. Massive plot spoilers below so go goggle unicorn nipples  if you don't want the story finale ruined for you.

In the story, the Tau encounter a Deathwatch team that had been wiped out prior to finishing their mission. The last of which was a member of the Iron Hands. During a subsequent battle, the Iron Hands' Marine and it starts to reanimate slightly asking to be reenergised. The Tau does so, by feeding it a drone and the Marine becomes combat capable once more. Hand to hand, moving around, that sort of jazz. Limited communication (the Tau could understand Gothic) At battle's end the Tau end up stripping their own discarded equipment to power up the Marine even more so. It's during the after mission that the Iron hands Marine opens its visor and they see that all the flesh had long since been rotted and corrupted, the Marine was basically running on cybernetics only. Yet, it could still reason (did not engage the Tau but their joint enemy) and still wanted to complete the mission with cooperation. So, not just rote programming running in the background but it seemed, to me, to be actual reasoning being functioned.

So, in 40K, does it appear that conciousness may partially remain within (powered) cybernetics after the host has otherwise died off?

[Koval, Master Verispex]

If it's a bionic brain, then sure, why not? I see no reason for cranial implants not to keep going after the organic brain's decided to go into safe mode; a full-blown bionic brain really has no reason not to function to some capacity should an organic one have packed up under the same circumstances, and even a modest degree of cranial implantation should be able to keep something ticking over (above and beyond what your brain normally keeps running after a loss of consciousness).

And this is even without moving into what a machine-spirit is.

[Underhand]

The transfer of human consciousness to a machine would surely be a clear violation of the law against the creation of AI. 

The Inquisition and the Mechanicus would amphetamine parrot bricks.

The closest to what you have described that I have read in the fluff would be the transfer of a human soul to 'the Pontius' in the Eisenhorn books, but that seemingly involved chaos sorcery.

It definitely seems like a step in the fluff.  Not necessarily bad, but definitely not something we have seen before, and there doesn't seem to have been any lead up to it elsewhere.

Possibly a result of bad editing?

[Koval, Master Verispex]

The problem, however, is that bionic brains do exist in some capacity, though of course the full-blown kind are going to be much less frequent than straight-up cranial implants (where only some of the brain is bionic, as opposed to the whole thing). In any event I don't actually see why it would constitute an AI if the "intelligence" was originally 100% organic meatbag human being; then again, I have just crawled in from work, so my mind's still processing a load of unrelated stuff.

As a fun little side note, we had a Magos in Storm of Iron (his name began with an A, I can't remember what it was though) whose organic components amounted to little more than a face and a teenchy shred of brain matter (a bit of the cortex, IIRC); the rest of him was pretty much a giant computer. It's possible to interpret the scrap of brain as "the 1%" that stopped it from being a full-on Silica Animus.

[The GrimSqueaker]

This was a member of the Iron Hands chapter who do take that whole flesh is weak aspect to new levels of obsession. We also have the possibility of a major infection, this planet seems to specialise in them, causing emergency protocols to kick in the for Marine. Since the flesh was being corrupted and the whole fatal wound thing the Marine may have deliberately shunted as much as possible into the cybernetics as a conscious action rather than as a side effect.

[Benis]

I would assume Iron Hands to be strictly within the confines of Mechanicum traditions, their relationship is close so they would follow the same ethics and not wander into tech-heresy territory.

Now, for the actual concept mentioned here, for it to fit in my mind it would require some remains of the organic brain to actually be intact and somewhat functional, I would assume Space Marine brain is slightly more resilient and the added bionics would keep some parts of it operational. The way I see tech-heresy is that the Space Marine would fall under this if there actually is no organic remains for the soul to manifest through into the machine but just the machine intelligence working the organism.

[The GrimSqueaker]

Decide for yourself:

He turned his optic on me, weighing me up like an iron god. Abruptly the visor covering the right side of his face slid aside. In place of flesh and bone I saw a formless grey tangle riddled with electronics and corroded rivets.

He'd been dormant for an estimated period of decades so there really shouldn't be much original flesh remaining. The effect of the biological contagion is unknown.

[Benis]

Well, that sounds reasonable to me. The brain might be damaged and much of it is gone but it is still somehow there enough for the soul to linger and it is rebooted by the cybernetics' rebooting, remember that Space Marines can enter hibernation upon sustaining extreme damage and who knows how that is expanded on by the Iron Hands' bionic implantation. No tech-heresy and no extreme canon deviation in my opinion.

[The GrimSqueaker]

No problem there. This Marine also had little choice in the matter and had no real intention to "survive" the follow on either. Mission completion is taken rather seriously as we're all aware. The remains of the other seven Marines I expect were abandoned which is a shame for the Chapters involved as there's no response that the mission was, eventually, a success.

[Locarno]

So, in 40K, does it appear that conciousness may partially remain within (powered) cybernetics after the host has otherwise died off?

Short answer, yes.

Long answer:

The universal laws (the cult mechanicum's ten commandments, except there are sixteen) insist that "The Soulless sentience is the enemy of all life", which is the prohibition against A.I.  This is why the Kaban project - essentially a fully sentient, completely artificial war machine - was so utterly heretical.

However, this is a prohibition against completely-artificially-initiated sentience. By the time they reach the rank of archmagos, for example, ninety-odd-percent plus of a tech-priest's 'thinking' is happening in electronic cogitators. He is more machine than man but isn't 'artificial' as he's reached that state by a process of steady improvement. He's not soulless because he has been bestowed with a soul at birth by the omnissiah.

The counterpart, a complex machine spirit (say a land raider's weapons cogitator) is soulless in that it's not got a human mind at it's core but nor is it sentient. This is why you don't get star trek-style conversations with the ship's computer; it may be intelligent but it's 'loyal attack dog' intelligent, not sentient.

Where you need more than that, you usually find a real, organic mind - or at least the functional bits of one - wired in. Servitors, cybernetica and thallax all have some portion of a human brain in the decision-making circuit. Titans and warships usually have multiple servitor brains in the system.


With regards to a person surviving within attached augmetics, A sanctuary of worms isn't the first example. Princeps Macabee - predecessor to Princeps Hekate of Imperius Dictatio (in the Graphic novel Titan and mentioned in Titanicus) died whilst 'plugged in' - and his conciousness survived inside the titan's machine spirit, ultimately saving the engine.

[Lachdonin]

it may be intelligent but it's 'loyal attack dog' intelligent, not sentient.

I know its a rather old thread, but i'd like to pick at this for a moment... Dogs are very much sentient, as are most animals. The ability to perceive and desire to avoid danger (mortal or otherwise) develop attachments and feel pain are the only really agreed upon characteristics of sentience. Sapience is another matter. Dogs certainly do not exhibit sapience, though as an aside neither do many humans i have had the displeasure of encountering...

I think it's also worth noting that the imprinting of consciousness into an object is something not only within the realm of possibility in 40k, but happens with some regularity. Hell, its the basis of Craftworlder technology. Even without drawing semi-technical conclusions about the replacement of brain matter with artificial cogitators, in a universe so intimately affected by thought it's more than possible that the drive to complete the mission allowed the consciousness to remain in an otherwise useless shell.

Space Magic.